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“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Laurence J. Peter

Have you ever noticed that the people who surround you at work, wait on you when you shop or eat or possibly are your boss, show signs of incompetence? I used to see it all the time especially when I had to deal with a representative of a customer or the government. I know it drives a lot of people crazy but I’m not one of them. The reason why is that I read a book when I was in my teens that explains exactly why incompetence appears so widespread. That book was called “The Peter Principle” and even though it was written over four decades ago, it is still relevant and I highly recommend it.

In 1969 a Canadian psychologist named Laurence J. Peter published a book that advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, since named after him, which can be summarized as follows: “Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence”. Think about that for a moment. It seems paradoxical but it makes perfect sense. In most hierarchical organizations like businesses or government, advancement usually comes from within from individuals that have shown that they were good at what they were doing in their current positions. Generally, the new task the person has advanced to is drastically different than the previous one that they might have excelled in. If they do well at the new position, advancement occurs again. There comes a point however where the individual is advanced into a position that they are unsuited for or just can’t do. That’s when why they reach the level of their “incompetence”, we’re stuck with them. This is how the Urban Dictionary describes it:

“People get promoted by being good, but not when they’re lousy at their job. The Peter Principle states that people will be promoted until they enter a job that they are no good at, and there they will stay forever. That’s why every career manager is terrible at his job.

Bob made middle manager thanks to the Peter Principle.”

Dr. Peter’s book was widely considered a parody when it was released and was extremely successful. The language is witty and he came up with nonsensical terms to describe the positions he was writing about. I guess that’s why I liked it in my teens, I really had limited experience with the work world at that time, but I never forgot the things he wrote about. The more I got out in the business world when I was older however, the things he wrote about kept coming true and now I re-read the book every few years to keep myself reminded why my former co-workers and customer’s reps were idiots. They’ve been promoted one level past where they should have been.

He just didn’t write about incompetence, he also wrote about super-competence and strategic incompetence. Consider Dr. Peter’s counter-intuitive claim that “in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.” He warned that extremely skilled and productive employees often face criticism, and are fired if they don’t start performing worse. Their presence “disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved.” Unfortunately, this pattern persists in many modern organizations and I’ve experienced this first hand. I’ve heard more than once, “you’re making everyone else look bad.” I used to keep a sticker on my hardhat when I was working that read, “Absum benefacta abscedo impunitas”. That’s Latin for, “No good deed goes unpunished”. If you know about the Peter principle, and follow what he writes about, it makes your working life pretty easy.

Now think about strategic incompetence. This I’ve used to avoid being promoted into a position that I in no way in hell wanted. How this works is once you see the writing on the wall that promotion is inevitable, you start messing up. And keep messing up until the promotion threat passes. There are jobs out there that are more pain in the ass than they’re worth monetarily and strategic incompetence is a good way to avoid them. Trust me, there’s jobs that pay well, have good benefits but if you find yourself in a position of being a glorified babysitter to a bunch of adults that should know better, run for the hills. I’d rather be broke and living in my truck than ever go through that shit again.

The problem is most people think that getting a promotion is always a good thing. Well, it might be for them, but it’s generally a bad thing for the rest of us especially if they’ve been promoted to their final resting place. Do you ever have dealings with someone who really knows what they’re doing? Don’t worry, it won’t last long until they’re promoted into a position they just can’t do. So the next time you have to answer to an incompetent boss or have to deal with an incompetent government employee, now you know the reason why. It’s not really their fault, and a lot of times they mean well, they’re just working a job that is above their capabilities.

And this is why everything around us is so messed up. Everyone gets promoted one too many times. And, most people want to be promoted again, no matter how crappy they are at their current jobs. Thus, the dysfunction of everything we see around us.

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Amazingly enough, a male friend posted this little gem on my facebook wall today. I’m constantly amazed that any men are still out there that believe this crap that (mostly women) post on their social media. I thought its description of women so ridiculous (this may have been somewhat true in the past) given the socio-sexual-men are sexist society that we live in today that I thought I’d rewrite it to more closely conform to what I see that surrounds us every day. Here goes (rewrites are in bold):

Whatever you give a woman,

she will demand more.

If you give her your love,

she will take away everything that is important to you; friends, hobbies, family and more. She will give you the ultimatum: Them or me.

If you give her a house,

she will make it hers alone and relegate you to some hidden basement or garage. Then she’ll take it in the divorce.

If you give her groceries,

she’ll get fat. You’ll be lucky to ever have a meal prepared for you.

If you give her a smile,

she’ll either think you’re creepy or if she’s close to the wall, will think she’s found her meal ticket.

Sounds pretty good to me. Get to use government money to hire underage prostitutes and when your supervisors find out about it, hell, they can’t fire you. The civil service contract says that even the top person has to go through a “process” before any disciplinary action is taken. Seems a pretty good deal to me.

This isn’t going to last too much longer but if this is something you might find interesting in your second year of college, go for it. Talk about a free ticket for depravity. I’ve seen none better.

“Some see a clear line between genetic enhancement and other ways that people seek improvement in their children and themselves. Genetic manipulation seems somehow worse – more intrusive, more sinister – than other ways of enhancing performance and seeking success. But, morally speaking, the difference is less significant than it seems. Bioengineering gives us reason to question the low-tech, high-pressure child-rearing practices we commonly accept. The hyper parenting familiar in our time represents an anxious excess of mastery and dominion that misses the sense of life as a gift. This draws it disturbingly close to eugenics… Was the old eugenics objectionable only insofar as it was coercive? Or is there something inherently wrong with the resolve to deliberately design our progeny’s traits… But removing coercion does not vindicate eugenics. The problem with eugenics and genetic engineering is that they represent a one-sided triumph of willfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding.” Michael J. Sandel

This is an article that I’ve been thinking about and working on for a while and admittedly, I’ve been wondering if I should post it at all. It’s probably going to be one of the more controversial posts I’ve ever written but given where we find ourselves today, I’ve finally gotten to where the discussion of some of the inconvenient truths that we find ourselves surrounded by today should be exposed and maybe, just maybe, we can start a dialog where we decide to continue down the trainwreck we see coming or can put our efforts towards making life a bit better for us imperfect morphisms of colonial bacteria and protoplasm that we call humans. Mainly, what I’m seeing is a return to the eugenic model among the elites and they are using bioethics to justify their actions.

We’re going to get some things out of the way first.

“The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenicists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.” Nikola Tesla

Now for some definitions:

“bi·o·eth·ics (bī′ō-ĕth′ĭks) n. (used with a sing. verb) The study of the ethical and moral implications of new biological discoveries and biomedical advances, as in the fields of genetic engineering and drug research.” In a nutshell, eugenics.

“eu·gen·ics yo͞oˈjeniks/ noun The science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.”

Those are the definitions that you are going to discover if you think of these things and both definitions are crafted to make you not think about them very much more. Bioethics seems to be something that erudite people in the fields named would consider so that harm isn’t done to the individuals that might be subject to “genetic engineering and drug research“. Sounds all warm and fluffy, doesn’t it? Whereas eugenics is evil because Naaaziis! Neither definition could be further from the truth and in the following paragraphs, I’m going to explain why.

Let’s delve into bioethics first. Where did this field come from and how was the term decided upon? This link is a good place to start but I’ve come to a conclusion of my own.

Bioethics evolved as a directed and funded discipline as a cover for the elites countering their expanding interest in eugenics and depopulation. Think about it, when you plan to at the least improve the genetic health of your own breeding stock and ensure that the lower genetically aware masses wouldn’t show up with pitchforks at your gates, you’ve got to placate them in some way. Your average person understands ethics and generally tries to live their life ethically. This type of person laps up a term like bioethics like candy. They don’t understand the scientific push towards making sure that the “useless eaters” don’t propagate too much is what’s has been planned for them all along. A term like “bioethics” is a bit of an opiate to someone who isn’t completely aware when faced with the increasingly genetic and chemical push towards controlling their nutrition, medicine and even if they are allowed to reproduce. New GMO food? We’ve got bioethicists worrying about the consequences of foods that have never been seen on this planet before and in the end singing their praises. Stem cell research? Bioethicists are all over that and from what I’ve been researching, they’re all for continued progress no matter how the research is accomplished. It doesn’t matter the subject, bioethicists are there to provide cover for every new line of research no matter how harmful it might turn out in the end. They are the “useful idiots”, the ones who can be depended on to publish multiple page papers in scientific journals full of obfuscation to justify their master’s goals. Now I realize that if nearly fifty percent of the population was forced to read this last paragraph, they wouldn’t get past the first sentence or if they did manage to read it over a couple of days, they wouldn’t have understood a word of it. And here’s where we are going to segue into eugenics.

Do any of you know the origin of the eugenics movement in the west? I didn’t think so. Because, “Naaaziiis“ and all of them being the most evil people eeveerrr on the face of the planet. You might be surprised that the real push for eugenics came from white women from America that didn’t want blacks reproducing.

“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.” Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review.

“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Chapter on “The Cruelty of Charity,” pages 116, 122, and 189. And who do you guess this woman thought should have never bred at all?

It amazes me given the history of Planned Parenthood that the institution is still in business. But given the purpose of it from the beginning, not so much. But here’s the reasons for the purpose of bioethics and eugenics fields, they are self centering edifices that keep the information between in balance and don’t bring much attention to themselves. Which is just the way the elites like it. It takes a bit of time for people like us to figure out what they’re up to but then we have to make a decision. Everyone has an opinion on who they socialize with and maybe welcome into their families, but there is a far more difficult question we have to ask ourselves that the fields of bioethics and eugenics ensure has to be asked. Who lives? Who breeds? And who makes those decisions?

I’ll admit that given my life experiences, I’ve become more and more “Social Darwinist“. What that means is you quickly come to the conclusion after a huge amount of travel, exposure to different cultures all over the world, you ask yourself of the people you’ve been exposed to, “If you can’t feed yourself and your offspring, why do you or they deserve to live?” That might seem harsh, but given half of the world’s population is dependent on some type or other of society’s largesse, it’s making more and more sense. This brings up some hard questions that we are going to have ask of ourselves, “Who’s worth saving?” is one of the hardest ones, but it has to be asked.

Bioethics practitioners, on the surface of their published journals, postulate that everyone is worth saving. But do they believe what they espouse? Eugenics postulates that only the most fit are worth saving and we should encourage them to breed more than the “useless eaters“. But is that really the case? The unfortunate fact of the matter is, there are certain sections of any population that are more suited to civilization, technological advances, peaceful co-existence and generally more of what the human species strives for, “To be better“. The rest? Who knows? But, how do you identify the ones worth saving? It’s not a question that I ever want to be asked.

So what to do with the rest? You have to realize that there are examples of the unfit (I know it’s a harsh word but I can’t find a better description) among all races, classes and social strata. Given the undeniability of genetically provable intelligence differences among certain social classes and racial groups, the results are easy to predict. The upper strata social groups among the races are pretty good at expelling, hiding or warehousing their unfits but there is a huge amount of guilt being spread around at the conditions of the ones that have no hope of uplifting themselves because of inherent genetic unintelligence or sometimes just because they were born into disadvantageous conditions.

This has severe consequences if the support mechanisms for the unfit fail. Is everyone worth saving?

No. I realize that because of my age, I might fall into that category. But, if you leave me alone, I’ll be just fine and I definitely won’t starve. Given that if the support mechanisms for the unfit are more likely to fail than not, my skills just might come in handy.

So what are we to do? Given what we know about population groups, probably the best we can do is hope the EBT, welfare, foreign aid and any other type of government funded support just stops suddenly and chaotically. Bioethics says this is cruel but given the alternative, massive global wide collapse, what choice do we have? Eugenics postulates that the individuals that have the innate intelligence to rise above the inevitable chaos that will result from the social safety net being yanked out from under the unfit will either fill the status of warlords or will try to remake some type of civilized society. Personally, given the genetic disposition of the unfit, I see the former happening rather than the latter. What this is going to result in is divided territories among smart, well armed groups. Those that have been formed because of their inherent genetic advantage will closely observe the others that have descended into savagery and will pick them off one by one or en masse when their starvation forces them outside of their squalid conditions. Eventually, the unfit will become hordes that the fit will have no trouble dealing with. Now I know that I haven’t written about the elites role in all of this, but for the purpose of this article, it’s not going to matter much. They’ll be behind their gates and will watch what individuals like you and me are going to do; how we are going to react and the actions we take when confronted by the hordes. It won’t take long for the unfit to essentially disappear through starvation or attrition. Bioethics states that in this scenario, the elites will attempt to join with the fit. Eugenics postulates that they will try to enslave them and use them for their own purposes. It’s been tried before and if you know any history of the French or Bolshevik Revolutions, you see the likely results.

Interesting…Who do you think comes out on top? From what I’ve observed, I have no concrete answer.

From all the messages, texts, phone calls, even some posts that speculated I was dead over the break I took from posting here on this little humble blog, I guess I owe everyone an explanation why I took such an extended period to update this site with my paranoiac ramblings. I’ve always been proud of this being an online family where we celebrate alternative truths and opinions in economics, politics, elite memes, socio-sexual trends, nutrition, self improvement, world travel, privacy, firearms ownership, self protection and all of the other subjects that we think about on a regular basis. I’ve been involved in this little corner for nearly seven years, have been writing for multiple publications for around the same time and have a bunch of sites on my daily read list. Hell, I didn’t even remember that this blog is now three years old. But, I was noticing a disturbing trend way before I took the break and even though it’s not the main reason, I’ll tell you guys why I quit posting for a while.

We were (and still are) repeating ourselves.

Seven years ago this wasn’t a problem. Back then the internet exploded with sites that I’m not going to list because you all know who you are and I wouldn’t want to leave anyone out. Completely original thinking and insights that if you had been brainwashed by the mass media of the time growing up and doing what you thought was right but knew something was wrong, completely blew your mind. That was pretty much my experience and completely by accident, some of what I was writing about got folded into this community and the rest is history. Seven years is a long time for ideas however, and the more and more I read what is in my daily alternative news feed, the more I see repetitiveness.

I’m going to be completely honest here, there’s a bunch of talented writers out there that put my writing skills to shame and they were posting the things I wanted to write about earlier and with more prescience than I could have ever hoped to bring to the discussion. So, I didn’t bother, if someone was writing about something I thought was important, good for them especially if they wrote about it in an engaging way. But at the same time, I noticed something else happening.

I’m really not surprised by this. I’m beginning to see that some of the younger generation are finally pulling the screens from over their eyes and starting to research for themselves what it really means to exist in this dystopia that even me, at my advanced age, would have never predicted. Pus, they probably have more free time than I do given that I’m training an AKC Shetland Sheepdog (look for pics on my twitter feed), selling or donating everything I don’t need, going to the beach because it finally got warm and converting my truck for a cross country trip.

So, I’m not going to write about the BS I did before, there’s hella better writers that probably get up way earlier in the morning than I do probably to dig through my archives. Plus, with my bibliography, they’ve got all kinds of ideas they can steal. And, I’m not that busy, I’ll get to it eventually.

There is something that convinced me to start posting again beyond what I’ve written here. I’ve discovered something, I really don’t know how to describe it.

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“The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”Karl Marx

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are “Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”Ronald Reagan

How many of you know just how much of your life is determined by multitudes of nameless, faceless bureaucrats? You might think that the politicians in Washington D.C. have the ultimate authority when it comes to day to day decisions about how the government runs and how it treats its subjects, but if you have any belief in that illusion, you are sadly mistaken. The real power of the government is with the petty bureaucrat, the one you might see from time to time. Think the DMV clerk, the IRS auditor, the tax collector – any one of these individuals has the power, backed by government, to ruin your life at the point of a gun if they so decide.

“It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume…that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.”H. L. Mencken

Anyone who has taken an airline flight lately knows exactly what H. L. Mencken’s quote means. You are treated as a suspect from the moment you enter the airport until you get on your plane. And it’s not just airports – has anyone tried to renew their car tags or driver’s license lately? How many different layers of proof is one citizen expected to have anymore? It’s quickly degenerating into the old Soviet question, “Papers, please.” Now with the Real ID Act, it’s going to be even harder to prove who you are without the microchip that’s embedded in most forms of ID today. Mark of the beast, anyone?

“A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?”Marcus Tullius Cicero

That quote comes from his writings in early A.D. Rome (click the link to see when – for the purposes of this post, it doesn’t matter). But even though he wrote that quote very early in western civilization’s history, Cicero identified the central problem with bureaucrats and bureaucracies. The people who are attracted to bureaucratic or government jobs know that they are unsuited for any social success or productive work and it infuriates them, so they want payback. What better way to get payback than to fuck with people who they know are their betters? They relish their jobs because every time they can make someone wait, audit their tax returns, place a lien on their property or in extreme cases cause someone to die, they feel that their revenge is taken.

No truer statement was ever uttered and if you don’t believe me on this, just fuck with one of these dickheads. They will ensure that, to all extent of their government bestowed powers, they will do anything they can to make your life as hellish as possible and make you pay even more of your hard earned money than you do presently. Fuck with them enough, or just be in the wrong situation at the wrong time and they’ll ruin your life…or get you killed.

“The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous.”W. G. Hill

Having no enlightenment, no rationality and only self interest, bureaucrats see us individuals who want to live our lives without their interference as alien, almost as if a green extraterrestrial had walked into their office. They have no reference for what it is like to live as a person, much less a free individual with hopes and dreams and the means to attain them. And so, we are dangerous. We don’t behave “by the book.” And we have to be controlled. It’s all for our own best interests, isn’t it? Why should anyone be allowed to follow their individual talents and drive for the life they wish to live? That might make someone else feel inferior, just like they do. So we must be at the least controlled, and at the extreme destroyed.

“The purpose of bureaucracy is to demolish face-to-face social groups, to break instinctive and emotional social ties and obligations, and to subordinate people to the power of the state. It is cruel, it is wasteful, and it is unjust.”Christopher Chantrill

So now we get to the true purpose of the bureaucracy that surrounds us today. The bureaucracy is impersonal, attracting to its ranks people who have no interpersonal relationships, no social aptitude and inferior abilities. It is intended to splinter free associations among free individuals. It promotes subservience to the state through obstinance, humiliation, propaganda, obfuscation, outright lies and examples of individuals exposed for the most minor of infractions in its medias. It relies on destroying reputations, besmirching integrity, turning social networks away from individuals under its scrutiny, and separating families. It is, in my opinion, the most destructive force that we are exposed to on a daily basis. I’ll take my chances with the Taliban before I will with any bureaucracy I’m liable to be exposed to in my daily life. At least with the Taliban, I know where I stand.

“Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and “treat”? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?”Dr. Fred Oerther

“Whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and ‘treat’?” That one statement explains the entire reason for the War on Drugs. And make no mistake, it is a war. But the name is misleading, it’s not about drugs at all, because if they ever succeeded, there would be millions of tax parasites out of work. It is a war to ensure that the parasites continue to get fed and expand.Nothing more, nothing less. How is that working out for Mexico where the government there has just about lost control of their country because of U.S. interventionism? And why, since the U.S. military is supposedly in control in Afghanistan, is their opium crop still being grown and exported? No, it’s not about keeping people from consuming drugs; it’s about ensuring that people continue to consume drugs. Without that demand, the taxpayer trough would soon empty. Can’t have that now, can we?

“[I]f we won’t choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude — whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge — as freedom-loving Americans — the tyranny of lawless leaders.”Phil Trieb

Anyone reading the quote above already knows the answer. Everyone hopes they’re not next, so they hang their heads and refuse to get involved, even when they know their neighbor is innocent. And there’s a reason why. You WILL be the next target, because the bureaucracy never forgets and definitely never forgives. The iron chains are unnecessary in the society we live in today. Regulatory chains serve the same purpose just as well.

“The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.”Roger Scruton

This is the inevitable end of the path that started over a century ago. Look around you. How many of your friends, co-workers or families have their eyes open to what is obviously happening around them? I bet you can count them on one hand. They probably know deep down inside how much has been taken away from them, but for most people it’s easier to stay oblivious and collect their miniscule paycheck or if they’re like one third or more of the population, their government benefits. Watch some TV, drink some beer, play a video game, it’s all good as long as the checks keep coming in.

“Bureaucracy is that dreadful state of when more emphasis is placed on the process than the actual resolution of a problem.”William Powell

There are a total of 21,292,000 government employees in the United States as of February 2010. This is according to the Employment Situation Summary published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on March 5, 2010. This number shows an 0.6% increase in the number of US government employees compared to February 2009.”

That was in February 2010. I would dare say that with government expansion at the rates they are today, the number now is way over 22,000,000. These are people who are unelected. The huge majority of them are career bureaucrats, with huge incentives to keep their annual pay raises and future pensions. Think they give a damn about you? Think again. These are the people who still have their jobs after each election. Elected officials are a miniscule portion of the government and as such have very little impact on the overall policies that the bureaucracy relies on to preserve its power. Any elected official who tries to initiate reforms is quickly taken care of. Just look at the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination and you will see that the bureaucracy has become a monolithic threat to all Americans, no matter how high the elected office.

So I know you are all asking, “What can be done?” My answer is ‘nothing,’ because it would be pure futility to try. The beauty of it is we don’t have to do anything. The bureaucracy has set itself up for the most spectacular fall of any organized group of people since the Soviet Union, if not the Roman Empire. It’s going to be fast, and it’s not going to be pretty. As a matter of fact, just by staying out of their clutches, you can exacerbate their downfall.

(Mitch’s note: I wrote this way back nearly three years ago. I still think it’s relevant.

“Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married. It’s time for men to man up.”William J. Bennett

I know what you’re thinking; this is going to be another article excoriating men for what many authors have described as not “manning up”. But, my dear readers this article is going to go in an entirely different direction; that subject has been written about to death. I’ve always disliked the term “real man” as if there were “unreal men” in existence. No, a man is a man regardless of his masculine traits. One thing I haven’t seen is anyone writing about the opposite, what are the characteristics that define a man? So I’ve been thinking about the traits that a man should exhibit as he lives his life. I came up with a list that I think hits it pretty close. So without further ado…

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“We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.” Rebecca Pidgeon

We live today in a perpetually chattering society. We are surrounded by mostly everyone we have personal interactions with trying to get their point of view across or trying to justify their actions or beliefs or just talking about someone else to take them away from their own pathetic lives. Chatter, chatter and more chatter. It permeates every part of our society, from interpersonal relations to the TV we watch to our Facebook pages or our twitter feeds. All chatter and no substance other than a few individuals who we try to isolate that we really want to listen to.

I just wish most everyone would shut the fuck up. At least for a little bit while we catch our collective breaths.

Seriously, this has become a problem because most people that I interact with personally these days can’t do anything but chatter and mostly about inanities. If I hear any more about people I could give a rat’s ass about, sports, celebrities, supposed “reality TV” stars, dancing with the stars or any of the types of things that pass for conversation these days, I’m going to take two sharp pencils and drill them into my earballs.

But, if you have any type of social life, you are going to chattered about more than most. Especially if it is in a little enclave like I live in.

I should have expected it.

I am by nature pretty taciturn. I prefer to sit back and listen most of the time especially if the conversation is somewhat interesting to me. I’ll only interject if I think I can add some value to the convo or if I think the individuals involved are presenting themselves as infinite classes of idiot. I like solitude every once in a while also but it seems that is something that is getting more and more hard to come by these days. That’s why I own a little piece of property out in the boonies where I can escape to from time to time. But these days the chattering is like a swarm of bees chasing the elusive pot of honey until the end of their little bug lifetimes, the buzz won’t go away until they die.

Yeah, I know, I could unplug, go primitive and completely get away from the plugged in life that I live now, but in my opinion that’s the wrong way to go. I have to find another way, a way to filter everything that’s chattered at me and be able to glean the gems from the stream that is the chattering flood.

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“Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly.”George Raft

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an unapologetic gambler. That’s why when my friends and I meetup, like we did all this past week in Tunica, MS, we try to pick locations that are near casinos. That’s mostly Tempest’s, Dr. Bill’s and my choice because we plan the meetups, we’re pretty experienced in casinos and we know if you’re playing the right games, you can cut your liquor bill for the trip by at least 90%. Between drinking all we could while playing in the casino and all the abusable drugs we brought, let’s just say it was a really good time. It was way better than our trip to New Orleans and Matt Forney didn’t get injured which was a major goal accomplished.

Good times.

But that’s not the purpose of this article. I’m going to make the observation that I’ve learned over the years is that you can discern the way a person lives their life by how they behave in a casino.

“There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having fun and being smart.”Hunter S. Thompson

There are only two types of gamblers; ones who are having fun and those that get emotionally attached to their bets, especially if they lose. The huge majority of people who visit casinos are of the latter category because if they lose, it will affect them financially. And, they always do because they don’t know the games, make stupid bets and think if they can get lucky, “just this one time”, their problems will be solved. I’ve seen it so many times it’s almost become a cliche, some poor schlub will come to the roulette or craps table with his/her last couple hundred bucks and lose it in five minutes. Those are the types of people who should never visit a casino but they are the same people who irritate me to no end in front of me in the liquor store buying lottery tickets. Let me put it another way, if you can’t afford to lose, DON’T GAMBLE. Because if you can’t afford to lose, you will nearly 100% of the time.

Then there’s people like Tempest, Bill and myself. We gamble for the fun and the perks of knowing how to game the casinos like all the drinks you can quaff down and free meals. The main thing we do is before we walk into the place is we’ve already set a “lose budget”. What a lose budget is the amount of money that you absolutely don’t give a shit about losing whether it’s during the first night or throughout the week. Mine during this past week was a measly 300 dollars. I don’t know why I picked that number; I could have gone much higher, but in the end it worked out well especially as the casino we were staying in has, I guess you could say, a lower expense ratio unlike Vegas.

If you have a lose budget, you literally can’t lose or not too much. If you still have money left in your lose budget when you leave but you’ve drank more drinks than you can count and ate for free throughout the entire trip, You’ve won. I’ve proved it many times in my experiences and nearly fifty percent of the time, I’ve paid for my entire trips just by having a lose budget.

Just as example, at the end of this last trip, everyone but one of our participants and myself left on Friday but this gentleman and myself decided to stay just because we both were driving and didn’t want to deal with Friday metropolitan traffic on our way home. Our first roulette session started about 1 p.m. and I was winning my ass off. He was losing and was visibly perturbed. I got ahead up 60% from my buy in and seeing his discomfort, I said, “Let’s get out of here before you lose any more”. We went to get a drink and I did something that proved a point to him that I don’t think anyone has ever done before.

Like I said, I was way up. I even won a $150 drawing for reward card holders Friday evening. It was a good trip. We went to my hotel room for a couple shots of Beam and I pulled a $100 bill out of my pocket, threw it at him and said, “I want you to lose all of this.” He goes. “What???”, and I said, “I’m going to be pissed if you don’t lose it all before the end of the evening.

Of course he couldn’t lose it. As a matter of fact, he came out pretty well ahead. It’s a lesson most people never learn but it’s important one.

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